Inside The Album Of The Year

In addition to changing the whole paradigm on marketing an album, Beyoncé released a dual audio and visual album, complete with music videos to accompany every track—something only a few artists have done before.

In our Inside Album of the Year mini-documentary on Random Access Memories, we made a case for not only Daft Punk’s win last night, but also acknowledged the influential role they’ve played in music across numerous genres throughout their comparatively brief history.

Take a closer look at the nominees for the Album of the Year: Taylor Swift, Kendrick Lamar, Daft Punk, Macklemore & Ryan Lewis, and Sara Bareilles. A panel of music experts weighed in on each album to tell you the stories behind their pop culture impact.

Watch our Inside The Album Of The Year video below to see the story behind the band who was nominated not just for Album Of The Year, but five other categories including Song Of The Year, Record Of The Year and Best New Artist.

“They’re the British bluegrass guys!” “They’re folk-rock on steroids!” “The little banjo band that could.” Those are some of the ways that Radio.com’s panel of music experts described six-time GRAMMY-nominated band Mumford & Sons, whose album Babel was one of the big success stories of 2012. Watch our Inside The Album Of The Year video below to see the story behind one of rock’s most unlikely arena headliners.

We spoke with experts, including Leah Greenblatt of Entertainment Weekly, Anthony DeCurtis of Rolling Stone, James Montgomery of MTV, author Alan Light, Booker and McCabe from AMP Radio and Stryker from KROQ weigh in on the guitar god’s road to the GRAMMYS.

Although it was released in 2011, The Black Keys’ El Camino was one of the biggest albums of 2012; it catapulted the group to arena-headlining status and earned them five GRAMMY nominations, including Album Of The Year.